Google Glass is no way to see sex

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22 January 2014

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For those of you who thought Google Glass was the sort of yawn-inducing tech ephemera only Which? magazine-reading IT consultants would be interested in, sit down: a raunchy new app looks set to sex up the fledgling brand.

Developed by Lebanese designer Sherif Maktabi, ‘Sex With Glass’ allows users to view themselves doing the deed from the perspective of their partner, and, if linked to a smartphone, from a third-person perspective, too. Its other features include the ability to turn down the lights, put on sensual music and browse the internet for suggested new positions using voice commands. When you’re finished, simply say to your specs ‘pull out’ (geddit?) and the app will edit together a nifty little video of your antics.

It started life at a Central Saint Martins ‘hackathon’ last November, where students of the esteemed London design college were invited to develop ideas for Google Glass apps. Sex with Glass has been in development ever since.

According to Sherif Maktabi, the Lebanese designer heading up the project, Sex With Glass is the answer to that immortal question: ‘How can we make sex more awesome with Google Glass?’ He added that the app would help partners be more responsive to one another’s needs.

Google resisted pornographic apps for Glass before. But, by ensuring the app would automatically delete the footage five hours post-coitus, Maktabi may well win Google over. They are aware of the project and have, as yet, voiced no concerns.

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Indeed, while the app may lend sex all the charm and intimacy of a seedy webcam site, it isn’t, by modern standards, pornographic. Instead it plays into a modern appetite that is far more disturbing: the compulsion to pore over our sex lives.

Nowadays, the yadda-yadda of sexperts and the explosion of sexual-health campaigns have eroded the value and pleasure of sexual intimacy. Sex has become something objectified and clinical in the calls for us to agonise about our prowess and speculate about it with our partners, our ‘therapists’, or our friends. What Maktabi fails to realise is that sex was significantly ‘more awesome’ before we were compelled to poke and prod at it like a laboratory specimen.

Sex With Glass may appear a ridiculous product, but in a time when those who value sex as a private, intimate act are thought of as either suspicious, prudish or both, it may, sadly, find an audience.